


Visions

by Hypothetical_Lad



Category: Original Work
Genre: I'm tired, Monsters, Other, Science Fiction, Surreal, Well - Freeform, an attempt at cosmic horror, cosmic horror, its kinda cosmic horror, not really tho
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:15:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26207797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hypothetical_Lad/pseuds/Hypothetical_Lad
Kudos: 2





	1. The drive back home

When I was a kid, my parents used to take me monthly to visit the neighbouring city for a day.

I’d sit in the backseat of my dad’s old convertible, and we’d drive down the highway and past the forested mountains that surrounded our town.

My favourite part of those visits was the drive back home at night, where I would look out my window and into the gaps between the tall trees, always hoping to see a monster peeking back at me.  
I would usually end up falling asleep with my face pressed against the glass, woken eventually by my father when we got back home.

He'd watch me as I'd curse myself for falling asleep, and would chuckle when I'd vow to stay awake long enough to see the monsters next time. 

Then when I was twelve years old, we moved down south to the deserts, and my parents swapped out the convertible for a brand new Chevrolet. 

There were no more forests to squint at under the sun’s dying light. The roads from our new town were lined by only sand and cacti, without a single mountain on the horizon. I spent the rest of my childhood and teenage years there, and I barely enjoyed a second of it.

Even though we still made monthly visits to the new city near our new home, the journeys back no longer brought the same joy that they once did. If there’d been anything better to do, I wouldn’t have bothered looking out the windows.

When I turned 20, I decided to move away, I couldn't live in that depressing desert town any longer.

My father was a car nut, and he surprised me with a mustang for my birthday. Despite the hideous shade of orange he chose, I was overjoyed, and this was the car I made my journey in.

I left my parents to their comfortable desert life, and headed back to the familiar mountainous town I grew up in.

It took me just less than a week to get back home, and I arrived at the still familiar city late one Thursday night.

A wave of nostalgia passed over me as soon as I entered that tree-lined highway, and I thought back to the many nights I spent searching for monsters for the first time in many years.

Gazing out through the branches, I realised that this had been a moment I had been waiting for ever since I'd left, and that I could finally be truly happy again.

And it was on that last day of driving, when I was the happiest I'd felt in years, that was when I saw my first monster.


	2. Home Sweet Home

I thought it was just a wolf at first.   
It was physically indistinguishable from a wolf, but it was at least twice the size of any wolf I knew of.  
More than twice the size actually, the creature completely dwarfed my car in size.

I say creature now, but back then I had no idea what to call the things I saw.

It took me a few seconds to process what I’d just seen, and I’m lucky I did, because I surely would have gone into a blind panic and crashed into something otherwise.   
The creature stood silently and watched me from the middle of the otherwise empty highway, and I watched it in my side mirror as it slunk away back into the woods.  
Too scared now to look out at the forest anymore, I kept my eyes on the road ahead for the last hour of my drive.

When I pulled up outside my house, I left my luggage in the car and rushed inside.  
I’d forgotten that all the rooms had large, curtainless windows, and I ended up hiding under the bed so that I couldn’t see outside.  
It took me several hours to fall asleep, despite how exhausted I felt. 

When I woke up the next morning, I came to the conclusion that I’d fallen asleep at the wheel and had simply dreamt up the gigantic wolf. Either that or my tired mind had exaggerated the size of a normal wolf by an absurd amount.  
There were still some doubts in my mind about these conclusions, but I didn’t let them keep me from leaving the house to unpack my belongings.

After this I decided to pick up some curtains at the local hardware store. I was still pretty freaked out by the prior night, but I argued the purchase was for privacy purposes only.  
As I set up the curtains all around the house, the sense of dread that plagued me began to fade away, and my lack of proper sleep began to catch up on me.  
I sat back on my bed, and looked fondly out the window at my new backyard.  
This is my childhood home, I remember thinking, and I will be safe and happy here.

As fate would have it, it was at that moment when I noticed a shape writhing around behind the empty fish pond in the back corner of the yard.

I was able to get a good look at this second monster, and I wish I wasn't, because it was so much worse than the first one.

This second creature resembled a giant centipede, no, multiple, giant centipedes, all joined together at one central point. As I reflect on it now, its movements were similar to that of an octopus, each of its ‘limbs’ working to pull its horrifying form towards me.  
Thankfully, I fainted almost immediately after observing that wicked abomination.

I must have only been out for a few minutes, and when I awoke, the creature was nowhere to be seen. Nevertheless I closed the bedroom curtains and rummaged through my stuff to find the closest thing I had to a weapon.  
My baseball bat from high school was the first thing I found, and I clutched it tightly as I sat on my living room couch.  
I stayed there till my clock sounded to tell me it was 6 o'clock, and I reluctantly got up to make something for dinner. The microwave meals I’d bought to use later in the week were the only thing I could focus enough to prepare, and I kept the bat held in one hand while I waited for it to cook.

Halfway through the meal, I got up and blocked the front door with one of the wardrobes that sat empty in the guest room.  
I stayed up all night, watching the curtains with my bat poised to strike in case the creature suddenly burst through the window. 

At 4am in the morning, I heard something crashing around outside. With a surge of adrenaline mixed with a sense of foolish courage, I decided to go and investigate.  
I was relieved and slightly annoyed when I found the source of the noise was merely a raccoon rifling through my trash cans. I was in such a state that I didn't even shoo it away.  
The centipede-thing could have still been lurking about still though, and I quickly turned to head back inside. 

And there sat that horrible creature, it's countless legs twitching in the cool night air as it writhed around on my front porch.

The bat fell through my fingers and I sprinted away from it as fast as I could. I stopped beside my car and only remembered then that I'd left my keys in the house.

I looked back over my shoulder and prepared myself for whatever grim fate the monster would surely soon subject me to.  
But the creature was nowhere to be seen, and I'd turned away too quickly to see whether it had been leaving the house or entering.  
So I decided to climb up and sit on the roof of my car, staring at the darkened doorway. I can't remember what exactly my line of thinking was. 

To this day I'm thankful that it was so early in the morning; I would've been quite a sight to behold to anyone passing by.

I only had to wait a few minutes before the creature came sliding out of the house and back down the steps toward me.

It knocked away the bat that I regretfully dropped, and I sat there paralysed as it got closer and closer.

Thankfully, I wasn't its target.


	3. A fun day at the shops

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The protagonist does some retail therapy

What I saw next still sickens me to this day.  
The raccoon almost escaped the grim fate that awaited them. It had scampered away when I’d dashed over to the car, but it was back now to continue its search for food.  
The creature stopped at my bins and reached its tendrils out, snatching up the oblivious raccoon. Then it contracted and pulled the struggling mammal into the centre of its body, and I watched on in horror as the furry form disappeared into the mass of writhing legs and vertebrae.   
I couldn’t even properly comprehend what had happened. It had happened so fast, and… and… God, words fail me, but I doubt that anyone could properly describe what I remember.   
At the time, the worst part of that experience in my mind was that the racoon had been completely oblivious to that hulking beast creeping up towards it.  
The rodent was facing the creature goddamnit, I thought later that day, It should have seen it coming.  
But no, it was unaware of the beast till the very end, and I strongly doubt that it could've processed what was happening in the brief seconds before it was enveloped and devoured.  
Then the creature just slithered away, climbing over the fence of the block of flats at the end of the street.   
I stumbled my way back into the house, my mind reeling. After inspecting the rooms to check for any damage, I went to sit back down on the couch.  
The couch which I now noticed had had hundreds of holes stabbed through it.  
Holes that all together formed a perfect silhouette of my body, right where I’d been sitting all night. I could even see slight marks dug into the floorboards where my feet had been resting.  
I sat down next to the holes for a little while, the truth of the matter soaking in.  
Whatever these creatures were, they weren't hallucinations. Just next to me was physical proof of this, and I sat there looking at the holes as tears began spilling from my eyes.  
At that moment I would have happily embraced the possibility that something was wrong with my mental health, that there was some psychological reason this was all happening.  
I slowly left and locked my house, the tears still falling, and decided that, at least for this moment, I would be safer driving in my car.  
The tears finally stopped, and as I drove I brainstormed ways to secure myself from that thing.  
A simple fence was out of the question, and I didn't want to look like a weirdo by installing an electric fence in an urban neighbourhood.  
Securing the house itself seemed to be the best option for the time being. I bought some metal bars to go over the windows, the only part of the house I could see the creature breaking in through.  
Then I went grocery shopping, my focus mainly on long-life foods. I figured there was no point in building a potential fort if I didn’t have rations to live on.  
I also decided to buy myself a couple drinks, I felt I'd more than deserved something to take some of my stress away for a bit.  
As I was making my choice from the fridges, all the LED lights running up the aisle simultaneously flicked off.  
My mind filled with expletives, and I turned to find the source of the power outage hovering just a couple yards away from me.   
Several long, jet black, insectoid appendages were jabbed into some panelling only four fridges away from mine. My eyes followed them upwards to their source, a similarly coloured sphere that floated about three feet off the ground.   
I watched as several more of these multi-jointed limbs erupted from its side, emerging from the sphere as though they had to literally burst through its exterior from the inside.   
Black fluid sprayed out from where they erupted, and they continuously stabbed themselves into the now near-destroyed panelling.  
The lights above me all suddenly flickered off, and the entire store was plunged into darkness.  
With this the sphere retracted all of its limbs, and a few lights began to flicker back on.  
Small flames rippled across the now perfect sphere’s surface, and I could feel an intense heat emanating out from it.  
I staggered backwards and shielded my eyes at just the right time, as the sphere seemingly exploded in a wave of burning white light.  
The force of the blast knocked me off of my feet, and I collided with the wall behind me, falling heavily onto my feet. I immediately collapsed to the ground, struggling to breathe.


	4. Disturbing new info

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our main character gets a better understanding of what he's missed in the years since he moved away, and he also gets a name. Finally!

I wanted to drive home right away, or at the least get away from the still-dark grocery store, but for a good few minutes I just sat there, my hands shaking uncontrollably.

It didn't take long for the police to arrive.  
A single car parked right outside of the shopping centre, and the two officers who stepped out didn't notice me. 

My hands finally stopped shaking, and I was just leaving the parking lot as the second lot of police arrived. As I drove past them, I locked eyes with the officer driving. It happened too fast for me to lose the expression of grim terror on my face, and I knew I was going to receive a visit in the next couple days.

I watched in my rear view mirror as they parked next to the other car, and I could see the officer turn to watch me as I drove away.

Behind their car, the sphere hovered into view, and if I didn't already look guilty enough, I nearly swerved off the road.

I quickly corrected my steering, and I didn't check the mirror again once on the drive home.

Once I'd arrived and finished unpacking my groceries, I sat down and started to take notes. I drew up crude diagrams of the creatures, and wrote down anything I knew about them. 

The reality that these creatures could be a part of my everyday life motivated me to figure out some kind of action plan. What should I do when I see these creatures out and about? How can I protect myself?  
I even contemplated putting an ad in the papers to ask if anyone else was seeing these kinds of things, and it was during these deliberations that I was interrupted by a knock at the door.

"This is Officer Hartley, is there anyone home?"

It was the police, but it wasn't the officer from before. There wasn't much else I could do in that situation, so I got to my feet and answered the door. 

Officer Ryan Hartley was taller than most people I knew, and there was no doubt that he used this height to intimidate people. He had an extremely pale complexion but jet black hair that was naturally curly and cut short to his scalp. I still remember passing him each time I left school, waiting by the gates for his son. The happiness that I'd seen in his face nearly everyday back then was absent now. Now it was contorted with worry and anger, and from the creases I could tell it had been like that for a while.

"Good afternoon officer," I said as calmly as I could, "What brings you to my home today?"

"You were there when the store in town lost power, right?" He looked over my shoulder, and I stepped to the side to let him in.

"Yes, it really was a terrifying experience." I tried to shift the focus of the conversation away from the incident, so I added, "This isn't about the groceries I walked out with? I wasn't thinking when I walked out without paying, I'd be happy to-"

"This ain't about that son. Did you have a place we can sit and talk for a bit?"

"There's the kitchen, and then I could make you a cup of coffee if you wanted." I directed him away from the study, where I'd left the notes sprawled on my desk.  
He had already sat down when I entered the kitchen, and he had a small pad of paper clutched in his hand.

"You got a pen?"

As I was fetching one from the study, I quickly slipped the notes into one of the drawers, just in case.

"Okay son, let's begin shall we?" I nodded and sat down across the table from him, my heart racing despite the knowledge that I'd done nothing wrong. "Your name is?"

"It's Cyrus sir, Cyrus Machado."

"Cyrus, okay."

He looked past me again, at all the unpacked boxes of belongings I'd brought from my parent's place.

"Looks like you only came to town recently, is that so? Or are you in the process of moving?"

"I just got here a couple days ago. I lived here as a kid and thought it'd be a good area to move back to."  
Ryan's mouth tightened into a grimace and he shook his head.

"Yeah, its real nice our little town. Usually is at least. Recent months we've been seeing disappearances, power outages and… problems with livestock."

I could feel the beginnings of a headache forming, and I sat up slightly in my chair.

"After interviewin' everyone who's been through one of these outages, the majority describe a bright light right before it happens. The CCTV footage is always… peculiar too. It cuts out right before the power goes of course, but before that, there's never any sign of vandalism."

He rubbed his eyes and yawned quietly. His face definitely seemed paler than I remembered it being, and there were dark circles under his eyes. 

"You mentioned coffee earlier?" He asked, and I quickly got about making a pot.

"As I was saying, no footage of vandalism or tampering going back weeks, nothing unusual at all. But at every spot, there's a light smashed in, or panels that have been stabbed clean through. Electrical wires severed, but we've gotten electricians in, and they always say that the damage couldn't possibly have caused an outage. You see anything like this when everything shut off?"

What could I tell him? I'd already decided that I couldn't go around running my mouth with talk of invisible creatures, but there was still other information that could help him.

"Yes, yes I did. I was browsing the drinks section and one of the lights had been, well, it looked like it had taken a couple blows from an icepick or something. There was the light that you were talking about too, and it felt like it was a couple metres away from me when… whatever it was went off."

I filled him in on my whole experience, minus the electric orb of course.

"You were flung into the wall? Goddamn, what the hell could this be?"

His composure had completely changed halfway through my story. The pen and paper lay abandoned on the table, and his hands were visibly shaking. 

"Hey, you uh, you mentioned disappearances?" I felt bad for pressing him for information when he was clearly already stressed, but I needed to confirm my fears, "Should I be concerned at all?"

"Oh that, no, you-" he paused to sigh deeply before continuing, "It's just been pets going missing, an alarming number of pets."

"I see."

He took one last sip from his coffee and stood up.  
"I'd better head back to the station, let you get on with the rest of your day."

As he was walking down the hallway, he stopped to look out at my living room window.

"Good thinking" he said as he walked over to inspect the metal bars I'd recently purchased, "Been thinking of getting some for myself to be honest. You can't be too-"  
He suddenly staggered back against the wall, and pointed down at the couch.

"Those holes! The holes, they, they-" he looked up at me and frantically reached for his gun, "Hell, hell, hell, hell!"

"Hey what are you doing-"

"Quiet kid, just get in the corner there and stay quiet!"

I put my hands over my head, and got down on my knees. I waited for him to put handcuffs on me or something, but I heard him start loading his gun before leaving the room.

He returned in a few minutes, the gun still in his hand.

"You can get up now, sorry if I alarmed you before. There's just, I know this is gonna sound weird, but there's been holes like that in peoples' houses all over town. Every person whose pet's disappeared on them, there's been those holes stabbed in their furniture."  
"I- I see, officer."

"God, I need to talk to the chief about this," he holstered his gun and shook his head.

He then wished me a good night, and I watched as his car pulled away from my driveway, a dull pain throbbing in my head as I went back into the study.

I kicked myself for not asking about the livestock, but I wrote down everything else he had told me. 

These notes would be the first of many, and if you're interested, they are still available to the public on our online library. 

Once I'd finished, I tucked the notebook at the very back of my desk drawer and stretched. 

As I got up and went into the kitchen to make some dinner, I had the horrible sense that something was watching me, stalking me even. My suspicions were confirmed when I looked up at the kitchen window. I decided to name the creature the centipede, for obvious reasons, and I could see several of its limbs hovering in the air just in front of my window. 

I sprinted to where I'd put the metal bars in the other room, and carried them with adrenaline inspired ease back to the window.

The creature sat there still, its legs twitching and swaying in the wind. It barely moved as I affixed the bars over the window frame, but every now and then it would run one of its tendrils up and down against the glass.

Eventually it slid off, likely in search of easier prey. I installed all the other bars before I got to making dinner, and by that time, one thought was clear in my mind.

Fortifying my house wasn't enough, I needed some kind of weapon to feel protected.


End file.
